Chapter Text
Under Styker’s command, James Howlett learned quite a few things about how the world worked.
First, Stryker confirmed for James what his brother, Victor, had been preaching all these years:
“This world likes loneliness, Jimmy. Violence and isolation and loneliness. It’ll do nothin’ but try and kill us, try to put us down like sick dogs. I’m the only one you can trust, and you’re the same for me, so we gotta stick together.”
The sentiment, while comforting to a 13-year-old boy who had just killed his father, seemed outlandish the more James thought about it. The world was a big place with a steadily growing population—even with the wars and sickness and hatred, how could they possibly be alone?
It wasn’t until Stryker pulled them out of their court-martialed time-out that James truly saw it in action—the violence, the isolation, the loneliness. Everything that breathed was an obstacle, and everything that didn’t was a job well done.
Secondly, and more importantly, James learned to remember these principles while functioning as a team. Victor had been right about the world—Stryker’s clandestine field trips proved it—but at the end of the day, James was still part of Team X. He still had orders to follow, missions to complete, and coworkers to fight alongside. Did he like Agent Zero? No, and he made that pretty damn clear, but he still became familiar with him, and with the other men, enough to refine their fighting styles in tandem with each other's abilities.
James mastered the balance of isolation and teamwork, thanks to Stryker and the team.
Well, most of the team.
Wade Wilson made things increasingly difficult .
It began after a particularly shitty mission in San Marino. The team of six men clambered into the helicopter, piloted by the seventh member, Bolt, who had stayed behind with the boss. The air was thick with sweat and irritation; the team didn’t bother hiding how pissed they were at the abhorrent failure.
It was a stealth mission, nothing too hard—except Fred got sidetracked in a pub across the street from the target building; John chased after Fred, trying to get him back on track; Victor was arguing with Zero, claiming “stealth missions are stupid! Why can’t we just barge in like we usually do?!”; and James was doing his very best not to drill his claws through his skull while listening to Wade’s commentary on the whole shitshow. Eventually, Zero gave up on Victor and went after Fred and John, and James ditched Wade to pick up where Zero left off: placating Victor as best he could.
Unattended and with nobody to smack him over the head, Wade decided it was a good idea to tackle the mission alone. If it weren’t for the fucking seizure he had mid-lockpicking, things would’ve gone perfectly. But of course, life is cruel, and James had to send John to phase around and bring Wade back to the ‘copter so they could regroup.
“On the bright side,” Wade said after Agent Zero finished recounting the events to their very pissed-off boss, “we weren’t caught! Even with David and the Scissorhand brothers screaming on the side of the street.”
James felt his eyebrow twitch, but he calmed the urge in favor of keeping Victor’s claws out of Wade’s sinuses.
“I’m thoroughly disappointed in you,” Stryker scoffed. “All of you.”
Silence fell over the men, but it was obvious none of them felt particularly threatened. They followed Stryker’s orders because he fed them, clothed them, and let them satiate their urge to destroy. Not because they feared him.
“We’re going back to camp, and tomorrow John and Zero will collect those files,” the boss announced. “The rest of you will stay put until I decide a fit punishment. Am I clear?”
A chorus of “yes sir” echoed through the helicopter, and a moment later, Stryker gave Bolt the green light to take to the sky.
They arrived back at camp, a clearing in the mountains with a cluster of tents and a makeshift fire pit, and the men climbed out just as miserably as they climbed on. Victor made a point to stomp and growl, muttering obscenities under his breath, and James clapped him on the back, steering him toward their tent.
“Hold it, Howlett,” Stryker called.
Both James and Victor stopped, claws and nails itching to break free. They’d spent the past sixty years taking orders from a human higher up in the military rankings, but neither had gotten used to the commanding tone. Something in James screamed at him to gut the man who snapped at him like he was still a sickly child getting thrown around by his father.
Victor’s temper was a good distraction. James pulled his claws, keeping the tips of the bone biting just beneath the skin of his knuckles. This way, he could hold Victor by the shoulder, stepping forth and maneuvering him to stand behind.
“I need you to stay with Wilson tonight,” Stryker explained. “Someone has to watch over him, and I don’t trust Zero to help him properly if he has another seizure.”
James scowled, offended and skeptical. “And you think I’m a better fit for the job?”
Stryker stood his ground, unmoving. His face said this was an order, not a suggestion, meaning attempts at negotiation would be useless. James sighed.
“Fine,” he scoffed. “But if that brat doesn’t wake up tomorrow, don’t blame me.”
It was an empty threat, and James knew Stryker knew that. Of the seven members of Team X, James was the most trustworthy when it came to keeping his coworkers alive. He was far from kind and cuddly—the standoffish, selfish, cold-blooded nature was basically a requirement for them—but James was practical. If one of them died, that meant more work for the rest of them. It meant one less set of eyes watching his back. And most importantly, letting Wade die would be a mission failure, and Stryker knew James was the most avid avoider of failure.
(Zero was up there, too, but he’d rather fail a mission than get puked on, which wasn’t impossible considering how Wade swayed on his feet, staggering through the camp like a zombie.)
“Have fun babysitting,” Victor huffed, half-teasing and half-annoyed. Saying he didn’t like being separated from his brother would be the understatement of the century, but even he knew better than to argue with Stryker. He preferred a loose leash over a tight one.
James sighed and pushed past Victor and Stryker, catching Wade Wilson before he could crumble into a sickly mass on the ground. Dragging him to the tent closest to the helicopter, James cursed his boss for not recruiting a doctor along with all these freaks.
Wade was unnaturally quiet when James dropped him on his sleeping bag. It was dark, but he could see perfectly fine thanks to the animalistic traits of his mutation. The dips and curves of Wade’s face, the sharpness of his chin, and the roundness of his eyes were photographic. Colors were iffy, but he could make out muted blue eyes and a yellowish tint to the whites of Wade’s eyes.
James was no school nurse, but that… didn’t look healthy.
“You have a healing factor, right?” he asked, plopping down beside Wade’s sleeping bag. The guy looked like a corpse, all dead weight and glossy eyes, but James could still hear his heart thumping so he wasn’t too worried.
It took a moment, but Wade responded, weakly shifting up on his elbows. "Wouldn’t you like to know, weatherboy?”
James’s response was an annoyed growl. This kid was always spewing some stupid shit.
Wade laughed, shifting a bit more so his diaphragm wasn’t entirely squashed. “Take your bone claws out of your ass, gramps, I’m joking.”
“Will you just answer the damn question?”
“Fine, fine,” Wade sighed. “No, I don’t have a healing factor. The boss was talking to me about getting one, but the methods were…” He grimaced, waving the thought away. “Not my cup of jizz. I can fight perfectly fine without being an unkillable freak like the rest of you sweaty sacks of meat.”
“Yeah?” James snarled. “You weren’t lookin’ too hot earlier, convulsin’ and shit.”
“Scoutmaster Kevin always loved it when I convulsed.”
James felt his nose scrunch up, concentrated disgust plastered onto his scruffy face. There was nothing he hated more than pedophiles and nazis. He hoped Wade would keep talking (which was a first) just to cleanse the godawful image from his mind.
But Wade didn’t say anything else. Instead, he wiggled around in his sleeping bag, pulled the polyester up to his chin, and fluttered his eyes closed like a Disney princess.
As soon as James processed the silence, he scoffed. “Wilson,” he snapped. “Get your ass up. I wasn’t finished.”
Wade huffed. “Yes, scoutmaster,” he sniffled, seemingly proud of the stormy cloud of discomfort hanging over Logan’s head. He dragged himself to a sitting position once again, this time tucking his legs up to his chest, chin resting on his knees, and arms wrapped around his shins.
James frowned at the sight. Wade was young, around 25, with a pretty face and a slender build. Stryker had called him a near-perfect soldier, and yeah, there was no argument about Wade’s abilities. But he was just a kid. Compared to James and Victor and compared to the boss, Wade was young. Any other human at 25 would be finishing college, buying a house, getting married, starting a family… What was this quick-witted, handsome young man doing on a top-secret black ops team?
James couldn’t ask him all that, though. He wasn’t sure if he even wanted those answers.
Instead, he furrowed his brows and focused his gaze on the glossy brown eyes sitting pretty in Wade’s hollow skull.
“I know what you’re gonna ask,” Wade began, stopping James before he could start, “so let me just tell you this: I don’t know why I had a seizure. Last time I had one, I was balls deep in my senior prom date in the back of her shitty Honda Civic. Better than an Odyssey, but let’s be real, I’d be getting an STD either way. Thank God for Durex. And antibiotics. Man, but it was worth it. Soon as I was done seizing, she took me home and then we did it again with her step-brother, and boy was that an awakening or what—“
“Shut the fuck up,” James seethed. “You’re tellin’ me you never went to the doctor after having a fucking seizure?”
“If you listened to the story you’d know I was busy being diagnosed with pansexuality.”
“So then what the hell?” James grumbled. “How are we supposed to fix you?”
Wade frowned. “If you’re done with your little tantrum,” he said, shuffling into his sleeping bag for the final time, “I’d like to sleep off this chemical reaction in my skull. Goodnight, peanut, see you in the A-M.”
Before James could continue his impromptu investigation, Wade blew out the candle in their lantern and collapsed into exhaustion. James could smell the exhaustion radiating off of him.
And it must’ve been contagious because not too long after, he was fast asleep too.
When he woke, it was to a hand in his hair, gently pushing his head away from the warm mass he was using as a pillow. Groaning, James blinked himself into reality, letting his brain absorb all the information his senses were collecting: the humid taste of the air; the fingers tangled loosely in his hair; the purple-y hues of the sky peaking through thin rips in the tent; the sound of a foreign heart thumping beneath him; and of course, the smell he associated with that jackass Wade Wilson.
Sweet but salty, cold like rain. It was by far one of the best person-designed scents James had come across.
But there was also something else in the air, too. A bitter, sour smell, hidden somewhere. Like an injury, almost? James wasn’t sure. He nuzzled his nose toward the scent, ignoring the stinging on his scalp where his hair was being pulled. There was compulsivity in his actions, digging his nose into the pale skin just above the band on Wade’s boxers, pawing at it with the blunt ends of his nails. The skin was colder than it should’ve been.
Wade squirmed, yelping when James put two hands on his hips to keep him still. “Take a guy out to dinner first, you perverted old man!” he squealed, now thrashing with his legs instead.
James, on a mission, ignored him. He wasn’t thinking sexually—he didn’t realize he was in a compromising position, nudging his face across the skin below another man’s belly button. He just needed to get to that scent, the one that soured Wade’s salted-caramel-by-the-beach smell. He needed to get to it, get rid of it, or maybe just see it, he just needed to see it—
The blunt end of a dagger struck James on the head, making him sputter and stop. His vision swam, fuzzy at the edges, and the core muscles he was using to hold himself up spasmed, forcing him to collapse on the tent’s floor. Wade took the opportunity to scramble away, twirling the dagger so its sharp end was pointed away from him.
“Been a while since someone tried something like that,” Wade said. He was gasping, clearly disoriented and, if James was smelling him right, terrified. “I know you heal and all, but you still feel pain, so unless you want your first piercing to be a lobotomy, I’d back the fuck up.”
James groaned, pulling himself up off the ground and sitting on his knees as he rubbed the healing bruise on his head. The kid packed quite the punch. “Whatever you think I was tryna do, forget it,” he hissed. “It’s not what it looks like.”
Wade laughed, but it was dry and shaky and James was still dizzy from the stench of fear. “You don’t nuzzle a guy’s V-line unless you want to travel the yellow brick road down to his Royal Palace of Oz.”
“I’m serious,” James growled. “I wasn’t trying to get with you like that. I think it was an instinct thing. You have this smell—“
“There’s no A/B/O tag on this fic, fuckhead,” Wade cut in. “The only smell I’m emanating is panic and ball sweat.”
“Wade, listen to me, I—“
“Sorry, James, you’re hot as hell and all that, and if you would’ve come onto me two weeks ago, we’d be going at it like dolphins, but I’m kind of losing my mind right now with the whole chronic pain thing and my SA jokes have been landing on the wrong side of the moon for my cope-with-humor agenda, so I’d really appreciate it if you’d just…” He trailed off, trying to swallow around the lump in his throat.
James had seen a lot of people scared before. He’d killed a lot of people and bore witness to that panicked, desperate expression saved for their last breath. Some of those people had been soldiers, men with incredible abilities who could’ve lived on to take a hundred more lives on the field. Fear was nothing new— causing fear was a routine.
So why, James wondered, did the look on Wade’s face make him freeze? Why did staring at Wade, watching the guy stop himself from hyperventilating, make him sick to his stomach?
The way Wade steadied his shaking hands and stitched a goofy smile onto his colorless face was an impressive demonstration of self-discipline. If it weren’t for the smell, Wade could pass as “slightly better than horrible.”
“You smell like you have an injury,” James clarified. He spoke slowly, keeping his hands where Wade could see them, moving as little as possible. “I have heightened senses. It’s part of my mutation, and I can smell something in you, bub. Something bad. We gotta get you to a doctor.”
It was Wade’s turn to pause and stare, gently placing the dagger on the floor beside him. “Are you telling me you sniffed out a disease in my body?” Wade blurted. “Like one of those trained dogs in nursing homes?”
“I dunno, dumbass,” James replied, “but I know what I smelled. Something’s wrong. Like, really wrong.”
“Okay, even if your freaky mutant senses are right,” Wade sighed, “we don’t exactly have the means to a hospital right now. We’ve got a raid planned as soon as Will.i.am and Ni Hao, Kai-Lan get back.”
“That’s racist.”
“No, my darling feral beast, it’s called humor.”
“Racist humor.”
“You’re no fun. Weren’t you around for slaves?”
“My family didn’t have slaves, asshole. We’re Canadian and also not scumbags.”
Wade snorted a laugh. “I don’t think you and Victor are on the same page there, buddy.” He shut himself up when the tips of James’s claws poked through the skin on his knuckles.
“If you’re finished—” James seethed.
“I could go another round.”
“Shut the fuck up. If you’re done talking, go back to sleep. Take advantage of the boss’s temper tantrum and rest. You have an internal injury to heal.”
“Sure, but if you put your mouth anywhere near my pork whistle, we’re gonna have problems.”
“I wasn’t—! Urgh, you’re so fucking annoying,” James grumbled. “If I wanted to suck your cock, I’d just ask.”
Wade stared at him almost expectantly. James scowled.
“No,” he said, “I don’t want to.”
“Eh, worth a shot,” Wade chuckled. He made his way back into his sleeping bag, this time holding the blanket part open for James to crawl in. “If this really is a protective feral instinct thing, I don’t mind getting all up close and personal.” Before James could protest, Wade cut him off. “Nobody’s gonna know if you don’t tell them, James, and you know I don’t give a damn about your manly reputation. Come cuddle with me, baby! I’m a damsel in distress who might have a tumor in his tummy!”
James growled but obeyed, crawling over and squeezing in beside Wade. Throwing his arm around Wade’s middle and pulling him close was instinctual, the same way rubbing his cheek against the nape of Wade’s neck was. The sour scents were strongest around Wade’s head, chest, and lower stomach, but scenting his neck was easiest, and James was tired. He’d just have to hope the scenting did its job for the night and in the morning Wade would smell all the way normal again.
He didn’t.
Sleeping with Wade (literally) became a routine even after they left San Marino. Stryker seemed to notice James’s ability to shut Wade up and keep him alive, and so he paired them up more often than not (much to Victor’s disdain).
James wouldn’t admit it, but he had taken a liking to Wade. Was he annoying as hell? Yeah. But sometimes his jokes would actually land, and James found himself fighting back genuine laughter. He slept better than he ever had before, curled up around Wade, protecting him from that sour smell growing inside him. Sometimes he even let Wade be the big spoon, but if the bastard ever mentioned it, James would rip him a new one.
The other guys started to notice after a few months, but both James and his brother bared their fangs any time someone insinuated a sexual or romantic relationship between him and Wade. Not because it’d be gay—none of them gave a shit about that, besides maybe Fred—but because James didn’t do relationships. The only person he cared about was his brother; the rest of the world wanted him dead and rotting, and the feeling was mutual. He was a weapon, not a person, and weapons didn’t have partners.
James tried to remember that, remember the loneliness he pledged himself to. It’d be easier that way. Having more things to lose would only make his unending life more miserable.
His only job was to keep his teammates alive. Keep Victor in line. Keep himself sane. Follow Stryker’s orders. Any more than that would only come back to bite him in the ass.
He tried to keep that in mind, but when he crawled into bed beside Wade, a scratchy polyester sleeping bag the only thing keeping him warm, he couldn’t help but think a little more. What if his life could be a little more? What if he got a stable home and he and Wade slept in a real bed? The stolen glow-in-the-dark stars Wade picked up during one of their many stops could live on the ceiling of their apartment instead of the flimsy walls of their tent. They could have an actual heating system to help with Wade’s chronic coldness instead of just hoping the sleeping bag and James’s natural body heat were enough to keep him alive.
James dreamt of these silly, unrealistic things when he clung to Wade at night. He thought about buying a house with two bathrooms and four bedrooms, dedicating one to Victor and painting his walls maroon. John would get a room, too, just because James liked him more than the other fuckheads on the team. Wade would have his own room, too, but it’d be right next to James’s in case of an emergency.
Of course, Wade was more than capable of taking care of himself, but if he had a seizure or something, James would be right there. And if James had a nightmare, Wade would be close by, too.
The fantasy helped distract him from the sour smell. It’d been getting worse as the months went by.
Wade had been getting worse, too. He lost almost fifteen pounds in the past month, and that yellow tint to his skin hadn’t gone away. James had tried to talk Stryker into taking them back to the States, just to regroup and get Wade to a doctor, but the boss said they were too close to turn around now. “He’s still fighting, isn’t he?” Stryker argued. “Wilson is one of our best. He’ll be fine. He knows better than to not be.”
James fought the urge to claw out Stryker’s throat.
He decided to go fill a canteen up by the river instead. Wade could use some more water.
When Logan defected, he didn’t expect Victor to understand. His brother was too far gone, too intertwined with the violence.
But he did expect Wade to. At least more than a lifeless glance, wearing the eyes of a soldier instead of a late-night comedian's or a morning cuddler’s. Those eyes weren’t Wade, not the Wade James knew. Those eyes were sour, bitter, and dead.
He felt sick. Everything about this made him feel sick.
So he left.
He left, and he found a woman with quick wit and brown eyes who smelled like caramel and the warm wet air before a downpour. She wasn’t Wade, but she was beautiful and sweet and strong-willed, and James loved her.
She told him the story of the wolverine, and he wondered, distantly, if Wade slept okay without someone beside him.
The years went by quickly, a consequence of near-immortality. He spent his time with the X-Men, found a home, kids to take care of, and a lover to hold late at night (or two, or three, or five, but who’s counting, really?). It took a while, but he pieced his memories back together with Charles’s help, fishing out images of him sharing a tent with a fellow soldier, of fighting alongside his brother, of a kind-hearted school teacher and a house up in the Rockies.
When Logan lost all of that, he was an amalgamation of memories and pain. The world hated him, and he hated him, too. He turned to liquor because it was the closest he could get to killing himself with this god awful regenerative mutation.
Slumped over the bar, clinging to the lingering taste of scotch on his tongue, he played the familiar guessing game—how much energy would it take to knock out the bartender and fill his pickup truck with stolen booze?
Unfortunately, the answer was more energy than he’d like to exert.
He was far past overstimulated by this point. Thanks to his obnoxiously advanced sense of smell, every sickness, stench, and strong emotion hit Logan’s nose like a freight train. He kept his mouth on the rim of his glass, trying to focus on the whiskey's grainy, woody scent, but of course, no such luck. There was a man stinking like a bacterial infection somewhere behind him, and further away was a woman drenched in anger and embarrassment, oozing something pungent that made Logan nauseous; he could smell oil leaking from a beat-up car outside almost as graphically as the diseases rotting in the bathroom of this shithole.
What the hell was he doing here, anyway? He couldn’t remember.
Maybe he’d get his answer after another drink.
Logan tapped two fingers on the counter, hoping to get the bartender’s attention—maybe some pity, too, if he was lucky—but another scent introduced itself before he could get any results.
Sea salt and rain. Earthy and cold, but condensed into a single space, a single body—a body wrapped in red leather from head to toe, two katanas strapped to their back.
Oh, for fuck’s sake, was Logan’s internal dialogue, I must’ve really lost it now.
Because he knew that bitter scent. It was more intense than he remembered (though to be fair, his memory was a sheet of paper riddled with bullet holes on a good day) but he knew who that scent belonged to. When the jackass opened their mouth, the sour hypothesis was only confirmed.
“Hi, peanut. I’m gonna need you to come with me right now.”
Hallucinating. He must’ve been hallucinating. Maybe it was a woman hitting on him and his fucked up brain squeezed and sculpted the sultry voice into something familiar, something to quench his loneliness. Pathetic, but more likely.
Whether the theory was true or not was irrelevant—Logan liked it, so he mumbled something about being not interested and hoped the person would give it up.
They did not.
He groaned, squeezing his eyes shut, fighting back a migraine. The person was talking some more, and maybe Logan responded, who fucking knows—but then the rainy-day-at-sea scent was getting stronger, and Logan felt hands under his armpits, yanking him up, and he decided then and there that he didn’t give a shit who this person was, they were going to fucking die the second his damn claws came out—
“Oh. Whiskey dick of the claws.” There was only a hint of amusement in that irritated, sarcastic quip. “No worries. It’s quite common in Wolverines over 40.”
Logan grimaced, feeling a growl build in the back of his throat. He pushed his focus on the metal painfully sliding out from his knuckles, ignoring how aggravatingly similar this stranger was to a familiar face long forgotten. Same quick mouth, same raging headache, same pain in the ass. “You don’t want this,” Logan heaved. He aimed for threatening but the words landed somewhere between drunk and exhausted.
The stranger wasn’t sympathetic (not that Logan expected or wanted any sympathy), moving quicker than Logan thought they would. Well, either that or the literal centuries of booze were finally catching up to him, fuzzing the corners of his vision. Logan blinked earnestly, and when he opened his eyes again, the barrel of a pistol stared back at him.
He smiled. Laughed. Leaned forward. Let that cool metal kiss his forehead, whispering to the migraine brewing in his adamantium skull.
So… what? Was it really Wade? If the gun didn’t go off, Logan decided this whole bizarre scenario was a figment of his intoxicated imagination. Part of him was proud of that, actually. It took quite a bit of effort and a lethal amount of alcohol to override his healing factor for anything beyond a healthy buzz. Kudos to him for outrunning his own DNA.
He waited for the gun.
It didn’t go off.
Logan fell to the floor anyway, smacking his head against the hardwood boards. Alcoholism at its finest.
When he came to, Logan’s hallucination was a billion times more vivid. Everyone was talking and being annoying, and once he finally managed to find his balance, some soldier poked him in the stomach and scattered his molecules.
Cue the violent antics. You know the story.
Even then, though, it took a while for Logan to truly come to terms with the identity of his… traveling partner, for lack of a better term. Wade Winston Wilson, “the merc with the mouth” as he’d been so cleverly nicknamed, was attached to Logan’s side—for a short and unspecified amount of time, yeah, but it felt like forever the way the guy went on and on and on. In the Honda Odyssey, Logan considered plugging his ears with his claws just to put the auditory torture to an end.
He didn’t, though. As irritating as Deadpool was, Logan was still trying to wrap his head around his existence and that was hard to do with scrambled brain matter. Yes, it was a different universe, and yes, this Wade Wilson was not connected to William Stryker in any way, but it couldn’t be just a coincidence that he and Wolverine ended up fighting on the same side once again.
It felt like a lifetime ago when he first met Wade. He watched mesmerized as Wade danced with those katanas, easily taking on over a dozen armed guards with lethal precision. Stryker said Wade would be the perfect soldier if it weren’t for his neverending mouth, but Logan thought it added to the charm—not that he’d ever admit that out loud. Ha!
He remembered long nights spent in tents, staring at glow-in-the-dark stickers peeling off the polyester. He remembered keeping another body warm, nuzzling his nose into the nape of another body’s neck, determined to change that scent, keep him alive, keep him healthy and happy and alive.
Maybe there was one good thing about not hanging around telepaths anymore: Charles and Jean couldn’t taunt him with the sappy, ooey-gooey thoughts he kept locked away behind his fierce animal brain.
Charles would be especially annoying about it, too, but in his own sophisticated, cryptic way. Knowing glances and mental nudges whenever Wade was mentioned, and worse if Wade was there in person. And Logan would pretend to be annoyed with it, but he’d be flustered and the professor would be thoroughly amused. He’d chuckle and observe, but after a little while he’d give Logan a speech about embracing and acting on the humanity within him – the humanity the world had been trying to deny him since the first time his claws popped. “Let them write you off as a ruthless animal,” he’d say, “but I’ve never seen a wolverine stop to admire the beautiful parts of an obnoxious mercenary.”
Logan sighed. All this world-saving bullshit and he was still planted on a bar stool, thinking and drinking and thinking some more. He tapped the counter. It was a rude habit but not one he planned to abandon any time soon.
The bartender—a friend of Wade’s who called himself Weasel—spun around, already holding the top-shelf scotch Logan adored: a golden bottle of Caribou Crossing. He remembered complaining about them not having it the first time he came to this shithole with Wade, but the next time he showed up, only about a week later, Weasel’s shelves were practically drowning in the stuff. He didn’t care enough to ask, especially not when he got every other shot free on a “Hero” discount.
“I know you can hold your liquor,” Weasel said, “but you should take it easy, Logan.”
Logan did his best not to snarl. “Just pour me the damn drink.”
Weasel obliged but not without muttering something unintelligible under his breath. Logan let it slide in favor of the Caribou Crossing whistling his name like a siren’s song. Weasel watched him as he chugged, which was weird, but again, Logan couldn’t care less. He was a goal-oriented man and the opposite of a social butterfly—he’d be skipping whatever conversation this rodent wanted to initiate.
“Have you met Vanessa yet?”
Goddamn it.
“If you haven’t,” Weasel continued, unprompted, “Wade has probably told you all about her. They were together for a long time. Got engaged, planned to start a family, and all that good stuff. Then Wade fucked up, as he does, and Vanessa is waiting for him to fix it, as she does.”
Logan huffed, rolling his eyes. “Good for them,” he scoffed, “but I don’t give a shit.”
Weasel sighed. “Look, man, I don’t think you get what I’m tryna say.”
“Ever consider that maybe I don’t want to fucking hear it?”
“I’m serious,” Weasel pressed. “You might not care, but Wade’s my closest friend, and I care about him. Vanessa is good for him. She’s stubborn, witty, caring, compassionate, beautiful–”
“Starting to think you want to bang her, too.”
The bartender frowned. “It’s not like that. What I’m trying to say is… Wade and Vanessa belong together, okay? Even if they’re going through a rough patch. As Wade’s friends, we should do everything we can to support him.”
Logan’s first instinct was to remind this bozo that this was none of his business nor his concern, but the hidden message beneath the surface punched him in the gut. He practically slammed his glass down on the counter, startling Weasel (and a few other customers nearby.)
“I hope to fuck you aren’t accusing me of what I think you’re accusing me of,” Logan snarled.
“I’m not accusing you of anything!” Weasel blurted, laughing nervously. “I’m just reminding you that guzzling liquor shirtless and then growling orders at a horny pansexual isn’t helping our cause.”
“Your cause,” Logan sneered. “I couldn’t give any less fucks about who that idiot sleeps with. And I sure as hell ain’t tryna seduce him, so cut the bullshit and get me another drink before I break his cup over your stupid face.”
Weasel frowned but again obliged. And when Wade skipped into the bar a few hours later, Weasel only watched as the mercenary threw the semi-drunk Wolverine over his shoulder and carried him home.